The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. It occupied a tract somewhat similar in location to that of Central Park in Manhattan, and the struggling, growing town crawled its way around the obstacle slowly--then grew many miles east once again. Resentment gathered against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped through at Harrisburg imposing double taxes on property held by persons residing out of the United States--a distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn. So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a site for one of the finest civic centers in America. The farm has begun to disappear--the University of Pittsburgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. The new Athletic Club, the development of the Hotel Schenley, the great Soldiers' Memorial Hall which Allegheny county has just finished, the even greater Carnegie Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are going toward the making of this fine, new civic center, and Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social heroes, Forbes Field the finest baseball park in all this land--a wizardry of glass and steel and concrete--is a distinctive feature of this improvement. [Illustration: The old and the new at Pittsburgh] The freight trains are gone from the downtown shopping streets and the two wicked grade crossings disappeared when the Pennsylvania built its splendid new Union Station. Other fine railroad terminals and new hotels have added to the comfort of the stranger. They are beginning in a faint way to give transfers on the trolley cars, and there is more than a promise that some day wayfarers will not be taxed a penny every time they walk across the bridges that bind the heart of the city. The bridge companies are private affairs, paying from fifteen to twenty percent in annual dividends, and they hang pretty tightly on to their bonanzas. But the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce is after them, and that Chamber is a fairly energetic body. It has already sought the devil in his lair and tried to abolish the smoke nuisance, with some definite results. A New York girl who has been living in Pittsburgh for the last four years complained that she had never seen but two sunsets there. There is hope for that girl. If the Chamber of Commerce keeps hard at its anti-smoke campaign, she may yet stand on the Point and down the muddy Ohio see something that dimly resembles the glorious dying of the day, as one sees it from the heights of New York city's Riverside Drive. A keen-eyed man sat in an easy chair in the luxury of the Duquesne Club, and faced the New York man.